About whether AI will maintain codebases from English specs without humans reading the code.
Has this happened?
Yes 42 (34%)Not sure 45 (36%)No 38 (30%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether AI will maintain codebases from English specs without humans reading the code.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
I haven't seen evidence that this will come to pass. But it's possible. English-language specs are ambiguous. Do you really think businesses with money on the line will tolerate an LLM making automated changes to a codebase and pushing them without a human in the loop? Even human programmers create outages (and we have "AGI" which is the holy grail). If an autonomous LLM creates outages 10% more frequently than a team of humans it is basically unusable. We would need to see a lot more improvement from current state of the art.